Author brings Filipina background to 'Angel de La Luna'

In the late '70s, teenage M. Evelina Galang moved back and forth between two worlds: the mostly white world of Brookfield East High School, and the Filipino culture cherished at home by her immigrant parents.

"I didn't read books that reflected people of color, especially Filipino-Americans," Galang said of that time.

Now Galang, director of the University of Miami's creative writing program, writes those kind of books. Her new novel, "Angel de La Luna and the 5th Glorious Mystery" (Coffee House Press), features the coming-of-age story of Angel, a teenage Filipina dragged reluctantly to Chicago by her mother after her father's death.

Galang will talk about her work during an author event Tuesday at Boswell Book Company, 2559 N. Downer Ave. She's a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate who returns here regularly to visit family.

Her earlier books, including the story collection "Her Wild American Self" and the novel "One Tribe," were aimed at adults. Coffee House Press is marketing "Angel de La Luna" as a young adult book for teen readers. At first, Galang was hesitant about that approach. But after seeing how enthusiastically and intelligently an eighth-grade class in Washington responded to the novel, she warmed up to it.

Her novel is deeply grounded in Angel's Filipina experience, with Tagalog words and "Taglish" hybrids dropped in the text in the natural places bilingual speakers might use them. Yet it's a story built on a universal template: a mother and teen daughter who don't understand each other in the moment. Angel's ináy (mama) sees the United States as a land of opportunity; Angel, who's become an activist, resents leaving her native land. She's still mourning her father when her mother connects with a new man whom Angel dislikes.

Immigrant families leave everything they know and love to go to another country for a better life, Galang said. "What would happen if you had a child who didn't want to go?"

"For me, the book started at the end, this image of Angel taking care of her mother, and doing it with her whole heart," Galang said. "How did she get to that place?"

Galang dramatizes Angel's reluctance early in the novel, when she's asked to help heal her mother's migraine by laying hands on her. Angel goes through the motions of massaging her, but her spirit isn't in it.

Angel and her late father bonded over drumming; she cherishes a pair of drumsticks from him. Galang said that drumming came from her desire to give Angel ways to express herself."

"Growing up in Brookfield," Galang said, connecting her own experience to the novel, "I studied piano for a really long time. During my moodiest times, (she sat) at the baby grand piano playing my classical music with all my heart."

Galang also incorporates in "Angel de La Luna" a subject she was worked on passionately for more than a decade: the plight of Filipina "comfort women," who were forced into sexual servitude by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Galang refers to them collectively as Lolas, after the Tagalog word for grandmother.

Since 1998, she's worked on a book called "Lolas' House: Women Living With War," documenting their experiences. Galang has met 40 of the Lolas; her book focuses on the stories of 15 women. She's traveled with some of them to sites where they were abducted, the garrisons where they were held.

Her Lolas book has taken time to form because "I feel a responsibility to get the stories right," Galang said. "I didn't want to just write one rape story, one kidnapping story after another, that would be mind-numbing."

When asked to recommend some books she's read recently, Galang responded first with one by her "Miami sister," Edwidge Danticat's "Claire of the Sea Light," and then with another book set in Haiti, Roxane Gay's forthcoming novel "An Untamed State," which Grove Press will publish in May.

She also praised Patricia Engel's story collection "It's Not Love, It's Just Paris," and Benjamin Saenz's YA novel, "Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe," which she called "a beautiful coming of age story of a young man and his relationship with his mom."